The contents of this page are derived from ¶¶17 and 18 of VIOLENCE and SELF-OWNERSHIP by Dr Steven Foulds.
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No person
escapes the ethics by which we all evaluate possible ways of life and
personal characteristics as more or less valuable than the available
alternatives. So you are not free to eschew ethics; you are free only
to choose which ethic you will choose to institutionalise in your life
and, thereby, impose on the world. The foundation of your ethics is the
kind of person that you are choosing to be (see About Being a Person).
The ethics of lying, for example, are different for someone choosing to
be honest than they are for someone choosing to profit monetarily from
her dealings with other folk. It is not my place to instruct anyone on what kind of person they should be, but one of my
interests in VIOLENCE and SELF-OWNERSHIP is the possibility of being more self-owning and less violent
than is normal for human persons. To this end, I start my formulation of a suitable ethic by trying to separate the
rules that are necessary for any reliable morality from anything and
everything that is not.
To see why this is so consider a situation in which
I want to get my sums right, I live in a community of folk who think
that they are getting their sums right, but want 2+3 to equal 4 when
they are paying others and 6 when others are paying them. This is
incoherent and promotes conflict. I want to detoxify myself from this
kind of thinking so that the rules I follow are self-owning. To reveal
self-owning mathematical rules I put aside anything that is not
necessary. This is because the reliability of a mathematical rule
doesn't emerge from any contingency, such as someone's political
authority or preferences, but from the cultural integrity which is
necessary for maths to work at all. Such a rule doesn't tell me which
numbers to add, divide or multiply, and it won't justify any output I'd
like just because I like it; the very rule that enables me to be right
also enables me to be wrong.
The above analogy is intended only to illustrate
what you are trying to do and why you are going about it by pursuing
the necessary rules of self-owning ethics. I want to get my ethical
'sums' right. This is a skill - a matter of know-how which I need to
learn - and what developing this skill needs is not some 'book of
answers' (knowledge-that) but criteria by which any ethical evaluations
can be tested for reliability (i.e., I want to know how to get my
ethical 'sums' right). Only what is necessary for getting my ethical
'sums' right can do this. Nothing contingent is necessary. So my race,
gender, preferences, socioeconomic status, nationality, habits, and so
on, are irrelevant to reliably reasoning about the value of, say,
cheating or being honourable as a way of life.

As far as I have been able to discover, there are just two rules that are necessary for a reliable morality.

Principle One: As with mathematics, only
certain rules, structuring [giving form to] certain relationships, are
necessary for morality because it is these relationships that give any
culture the integrity from which the intended output reliably emerges.
If certain rules are necessary to the ethic then these rules will apply
impartially to all ethical performances; they won't change from
performer to performer in the way of political preferences. Again the
analogy with maths holds; if a rule of mathematics really does emerge
from the necessary integrity of maths then that rule applies to every
mathematical performance in whatever circumstances; the status or
preferences of performers don''t come into it. If the rules necessary
for a reliable ethic cannot logically include anything contingent,
moral rules must also be universal; that is, they will imply
impartially to all self-owning self-government regardless of the
self-governor's race, status, gender, and so on. Thus the first measure of a reliable morality is that its rules are impartial.
In actual practice, everyone believes that their
reasoning is sound and that any reasonable person would agree with them
anyway. This means that everyone already purports to be showing which
reasons for performing are sound. So if, for example, you do x in a
circumstance because you feel like it then you are implying that
feeling like doing x as a sound reason for doing x in the circumstance.
There is a kind of tacit law-making here, an implication that you are
an ethical reliable performer - you are doing the right thing - and
that any similarly reliable performer would be led by sound reasoning
(like yours) to do the same thing in the same circumstances. The
popular disclaimer to the effect that "I'm not making rules for anyone
else" is just a way of avoiding this responsibility.

A universal rule is impartial between performers but partial between
performances. The same rule that justifies my belief that 2+3=5, for
instance, thereby justifies another's belief that 2+3=5. A moral rule
that justifies me lying to another in a circumstance similarly
justifies another lying to me in the same circumstance. If I think that
my lying to another is justified in a circumstance, but that having
another lie to me in a similar circumstance wouldn't be, then you are
thinking partially [politically] rather than morally (it is analogous
with my believing that 2+3=4 when you are paying another and 6 when
another is paying me). So a test of impartiality is to imagine how I
would evaluate a performance if the rôles of myself and those my
performance affects were reversed. If I conclude that it would be
valuable for me to, say, tell a lie to get an advantage, and I want to
know whether or not you are thinking morally rather than politically,
then I need only to ask myself whether or not I would hold your lie to
be valuable to me if it was someone else telling the lie at your
expense.

Principle Two: Millennia of politics have
clearly shown that (a) not respecting persons, (b) respecting a P moiety1 of
persons more than a not-P moiety, and (c) deferring to the performances
of P-moiety persons, are all ethically unreliable because they
contribute both to inself-owningity and to the compulsive human violation
of integrity. This suggests that a reliable ethic for being-with others
as a self-owning person would have to prescribe an equality of respect
for all persons. To accord with a true articulation of what it is to be
a person in the world, and of the function of ethics in this project,
this equality would have to account for the fact that ∙ all persons are
different and ∙ the character of ethics precludes having equal respect
for all performances (the job of an ethic is to evaluate differences;
an 'ethic' which prescribes equal respect for both honest work and
cheating, for example, isn't doing its job). There is no equality of
fact between persons; we all have different characters, strengths,
weaknesses, and so on. So this can be done only if there is a common
aspect of being a person in the world that is equally valuable to all
persons regardless of their many contingent differences. A fact which
meets this criterion - and the only fact which meets this criterion -
is the cultural/natural integrity whereby persons evaluate
possibilities in the world in terms of a permeate project. This is the
integrity which is specifically
violated by politics (which values some person above others on the
basis of contingent differences such as social status, race, and
gender), and the violation of which is experienced by persons as wrong.
On the basis of this fact, I conclude that a second test of a reliable morality is that it prescribes an equal respect for the cultural/natural integrity of all persons.
This measure extends the first by interpreting impartiality as an
impartiality of respect; we evaluate the performance while respecting
the performer.

Respect is the skill of treating a fact, which has value for [is
relevant to the welfare of] someone or something, as (1) valuable and (2)
under the ownership of that person or thing. I respect a bird's nest,
for example, when I treat it as valuable property of the bird even if
the bird itself has no concept of property and no culture by which it
evaluates its nest as valuable. So respecting the cultural/natural
integrity of persons entails treating it as both valuable and as their
property even if they don't.
This measure does not require that I respect
everyone's projects or performances equally. The difference between
respecting persons and respecting performances matters not only for the
being-useful-towards of an ethic but because, under dichotomy, the
alternative to political partiality is often said to entail an
uncritical acceptance of everyone's beliefs, performances, and projects
- including their lies, superstitions, prejudice, cultural
self-aggrandisement, and violence. The flaw in this is easily
discovered by asking myself how respect for persons would be served by
treating the projects of, say, a thief as worthy of the same respect as
those who work for their material possessions. The answer is that it is
not; reliable ethics require that I treat the cultural/natural
integrity of the thief with respect, not that I evaluate her
performance as a thief as being equally valuable as other possibilities
that were open to her.

1. It is a feature of non-moral (i.e., political) thinking to dichotomise
all possibilities into an 'upper class' and 'lower class' moiety (see VIOLENCE and SELF-OWNERSHIP ¶9). Where I need to refer to an instance of this, violence-disposing, logic, I distinguish the supposed upper class a 'P' and the supposed lower class as 'not-P'.

THE METHOD

The issue facing persons is that of how we should live our lives and
what cultural characters we should thereby actualise for ourselves.
Each person is settling this issue by means of a way of life that
emerges from a personal ethic. This means that if I choose to
be-towards less violence and more self-ownership in my life than is
normal then I need to renovate my personal ethic. The specific project,
in this chapter, will be that of doing this. This project will have the
same fundamental structure [integrity] as any other human project. In
this case:

An input value

Being less violent, and more self-owning, than is normal for human persons

⇓

The relevant facts

1. As a person I depend on various kinds of integrity for every actual or possible fact that I value.

2. Like everyone else5 I am addicted to the politics of violating integrity
in pursuit of the pseudo-significance of status in various hierarchies.

3. Both violence and self-ownership are personally ethical projects, so
any instrument being-useful-towards actualising the valued possibility, of being less
violent and more self-owning, will be a personal ethic

4. Any ethic being-useful-towards actualising the valued possibility,
of being less violent and more self-owning will be a morality satisfying
the two basic principles given above.

⇓

A suitable culture

A moral culture (to be chosen as part of the project).

⇓

The valued output

A personal morality is suitable for someone trying to be less political and more self-owning than normal.

In this project, the four input facts can be evaluated as true or
false. All other aspects of the project are exercises of moral and
logical skill [knowing how]. So none of these is either true or false;
they are simply more or less valuable, suitable, and reliable. Note
also that the value I put on self-ownership does not entail that
self-ownership is valuable or that you should value it as I do. All
that
I am claiming is that if my analyses of violence and self-ownership are
broadly accurate then I should be able to generate a personal morality
being-useful-towards being less violent and more self-owning. If, like
me, other human persons value being less violent and more self-owning
then the personal morality generated by this project could
be-useful-towards that end.

A SUITABLE CULTURE

The human commitment to politics is a big part of both our violence and
our inself-ownership. I cannot do away with ethics altogether, so an
apolitical (i.e., moral) ethic is necessary. There are three families
of moral culture which may serve: two performance-centred and one
performer-centred.
The performance-centred moralities are ∙ procedural
(that I ought to perform in ways that are fair, good, respect others,
and/or are otherwise my duty to perform) and ∙ consequentialist (that I
ought to perform in ways that I believe will output the most valued
consequences). Procedural moralities describe valuable procedures in
terms of performing in conformity with rights, justice, respect for
persons, and so on. Consequentialist moralities evaluate performances
in terms of their estimated usefulness towards desired or desirable
outcomes; they narrate that valuable performances are those which are
most likely to result in valuable consequences either for the performer
or for everyone.
Performer-centred moralities ['virtue ethics']
assert that (a) how I perform both inputs to and outputs from who I am,
and (b) being a valuable self (i.e., the kind of person from whom
valuable performances flow) is the relevant point of personal morality.
So what I ought to do is use my power of self-actualisation to try to
become a valuable person - knowing that a valuable person is one who
habitually performs in a valuable manner.

What generates the distinction between these three families of moral
culture is the way in which the rules that they outputs can clash.
Where a procedural morality may, for instance, urge me to respect the
rights of others, even if doing so threatens to result in a less
valuable output than would otherwise be possible, a consequentialist
morality would urge me to disrespect the rights of others if that
promises to have a more useful outcome.
None of the above cultures describe what the case is
according to some discovery of facts. They prescribe what a case ought
to be according to some concept of value, and they all assume the same
logical connection between what is valuable (the input value) and what
I ought to do about it (the rule-set). This connection reflects the
universal human assumption - which is necessary to being a person in
the world - that some performances and/or characters are more or less
valuable than others and that the more valuable should prevail over the
less valuable (i.e., that I ought to perform/prefer what is valuable to
that which is less valuable). The differences between them emerge from
how each is being-useful-towards the actualisation of valuable
possibilities and bad. In consequentialist ethics, for example, the end
[output] justifies the means even if the means are cruel, unjust,
dishonest or whatever. In procedural ethics and virtue ethics, however,
the end does not justify the means if the means are vicious, unfair,
violate rights and so on.

The criteria for selecting a moral culture that is suitable for my
project are just those justifying the adoption of any instrument for
any purpose. First, the culture should be reliably useful-towards the
project for which is has been selected. Second, it should be one which
as many interested parties as possible can use to their advantage. On
the basis of the above considerations, I evaluate a virtue morality as
the most suitable for someone who is intending to be less violent and
more self-owning than is usual.

The Culture of Virtue. A virtue is an ability that enables the
person who uses it to reliably achieve some value. Virtue ethics are
cultures which narrate that persons should cultivate virtues.
Cultivated virtues are habits such as those being-useful-towards being
a good cook or poker player. A moral virtue is any cultivated virtue
being habitually input to, and output from, the project of being a
valuable person. If kindness is a moral virtue, for instance, then
performing kindly is a valuable habit that can be cultivated. More
importantly, performing kindly would give you a kindly character and
having a kindly character would be your reason for performing kindly;
performing kindly because you are kind would become a way of life.
Moral virtues may or may not clash with other cultivated virtues. The
virtues of a good cook, for example, are quite compatible with being
kind; the virtues of an ambitious businesswoman may not be. Virtue morality is an ethical culture which narrates
that persons should cultivate moral virtues. What counts as a virtue is
defined by the input value of the culture. For my specific project,
being habitually less violent and more self-owning as a person would be
virtuous. Applying a culture of virtue to this project would
acknowledge that I was born with various strengths and weaknesses but
argue that, regardless of my natural or social inheritance, I can and
should cultivate habits which are reliably being-useful-towards
actualising the possibility of being less violent and more self-owning.
Working out what those habits would be is part of the project.

I evaluate a virtue morality, as the most suitable culture for a
violation-recovering personal morality (although not, I suspect, for
social morality), by a difference of degree only. There is nothing
magical about virtue morality such that adopting it will somehow
immunise my reasoning against my own addiction to politics. It is just
that, as a vehicle for my own attempted detoxification from politics,
as a means of living a more self-owning life, virtue morality seems a
degree more reliable than the other ethics, for four main reasons:
• My performances actualise a character by
actualising possibilities that are valuable to that character. Only a
morality of virtue addresses this circularity directly, and only
virtue-talk acknowledges that cultures are an instrument for
actualising a certain kind of character. The performance-centred ethics
reduce all ethics to a social function. But ethics are not just
cultures which determine social performances; they also and especially
determine who we are [our character] and the significance of our lives.
Because being a person in the world is a project which settles the only
issue which I have to settle (i.e., what way of life to live and,
thereby, what kind of person I am being) I hold that these two outputs
of morality matter more than its social function. My ethics primarily
serve the project of being who I am in the world; they output my
character and the significance of my life. Only a performer-centred
morality seems fully sensitive to this fact.
• The ease with which consequentialisms serve politics makes them unreliable for my purpose.
• Virtue morality seems to offer the best ground on
which clashes between duties and consequences can be resolved. For
example, procedural ethics urge me to tell the truth even if the
consequences promise to be disastrous. Consequentialist ethics, on the
other hand, urge me to lie if that promises the most profitable
outcome. Virtue morality would urge me to be a valuable person and to
intelligently balance duties and outcomes on a case-by-case basis, in
the most valuable way I can, because that is what a valuable person
would do. This promises to be far more relevant to performing
self-owningally as a person in the real world than does choosing either
of the conflicting performance-prescribing ethics.
• The performance-centred ethics imply that persons
were somehow made to serve value; only the performer-centred morality
properly avows that values were invented by persons to serve the
project of being persons in the world.

Where both procedural and consequentialist ethics primarily urge me to
perform in certain ways, virtue morality addresses my life-value
directly by urging me to choose being a certain kind of person and let
my performances flow from and back to that. This is more radical than
other ethics in the literal sense of addressing the input value which
is the real root [radix] of all ethics. Virtue morality does not,
however, flip-flop from 'doing' to 'being' under some strained 'faith
versus works' dichotomy; I cannot, for example, be honest without
performing honestly. The morality simply acknowledges that my character
and performances are integrated and that similar performances can be
more or less valuable according to the character which motives them.
This specifically relates moral virtue to self-ownership. So say, for
example, that I have a surplus of food, I learn of someone else who is
hungry and I share some of my surplus with her. To the recipient of my
giving it is unlikely to matter why I share my surplus; a hungry person
doesn't care whether I am being genuinely caring, showing off, stroking
my ego, on a tax dodge, earning Brownie Points with my
god/goddess/guru, or whatever. She is just happy to fill her belly. So,
from an performance-centred point of view, it is good/valuable to
perform the right/valuable act for whatever reason. From an
performer-centred point of view it is still good to do right, but it is
better [more valuable] to do right because that is what a valuable
person does. In this case, for instance, giving is a virtue because it
actualises a valuable possibility both for the recipient and, if done
for the right reason, for my cultural character. All ethics address my
performances, but my life-value does not just
inform my performances but also my reasons for performing. The
performer's reason for giving some of his surplus to someone in want is
not addressed by ethics that address only his performances. Virtue
morality addresses not only my performances, both procedurally and in
terms of probable outcomes, but also specifically addresses my reason
for performing as I do. To be a virtuous person, in terms of virtue
morality, is to be one who is normally [habitually] generous for the
right reason - with the right reason being that of being-towards the
kind of person who normally does what valuable persons do. This does
not contradict performance-centred moralities, and a morally virtuous
person is more likely to be giving, in any case, than is someone
normally vicious who gives only in hope of a profitable return of some
kind. But, under a virtue morality, the most valuable object of a
personal morality is not just to be good or do good, but to integrate
both. To 'be' is always to be something or someone; and being a person,
in particular, is something I do - a skill that I perform. So being
virtuous heals the artificial dichotomy between doing and being by
being-towards the kind of person who is skilling himself in the rôle of
performing the kind of valuable acts that only valuable persons can
perform. It is about developing and practising the skills of being a
valuable person. This means that a giving person, for example, is not
only normally disposed to give to others (the virtue is stable by being
habitual) but also reliably successful at doing so fairly, rationally,
and to good effect.

A Vocabulary of 'Better' and 'Worse'.Various cultures provide us
with various ways of talking about differences. New Zealanders, for
example, use a vocabulary of metres, centimetres, and kilometres, for
discoursing about differences in length or distance. Americans use a
vocabulary of inches, feet, yards and miles. All human cultures of
measure - ethical, mathematical, scientific, economic or whatever - are
instituted communally. The differences between, say, shorter and longer
distances, good apples and rotten apples, well-played games and those
that are badly played, performances that are fair or unfair, and so on,
are all real, but they can be expressed only once we institute
vocabularies for ∙ discoursing about them and ∙ formalising a shared
measure of the differences between them. These vocabularies enable us
to evaluate and talk about differences - and that is all that they do.
They do not commit us to believing that centimetres or inches are real,
only that the differences they quantify are. I can measure differences
by weight, length, colour, breaking strain, or whatever, but I cannot
find the scales of measure (the grams, centimetres and so on) among the
differences; I can find lengths of string, but I cannot find bits of
length in string.
A vocabulary of difference matters for ethics
because comparative [relational] characteristics, such as those of good
and evil or beauty and ugliness, are not discovered in objects but in
the differences between certain performances, attitudes, things, and
relationships, and others. I cannot, for example, point to any quanta
of kindness or cruelty in an act. Nor can I lay the kindness of a
performance against any measure of goodness built into the constitution
of the world. But I can point to differences between performances, I
can know that the differences are real, and it is the differences that
I measure when I compare performances with each other - not that a
performance is good or bad but that any one performance is more or less
valuable than a possible other or others in a context where more than
one is possible. If the supposed goodness 'in' a performance is
elusive, but the differences between more or less valuable performances
are both accessible and can be compared with each other, then it makes
sense that the basic object of moral evaluation is neither good nor
evil but the differences between better [more valuable] and worse [less
valuable] states of affairs.
A comparative vocabulary helps to clarify and
simplify my morality because my actual choices are seldom between a
clear good or clear evil. They are, rather, nearly always between a
limited range of possibilities, none of which is clearly right or wrong
but which are nearly always more or less valuable [better or worse] in
comparison to the others. To do good, on a logic of difference, is just
to choose only from among the more valuable of such possibilities as
are actually open to me; I do not have to pursue or achieve some
abstract ideal or essential good, an accessible better is enough. Once
a comparative measure is institutionalised, the comparative 'better'
and 'worse' and superlative 'best' and 'worst' can take over the task
of narrating 'good' and 'evil' without implying any thingish status for
values.

If I have a choice between several possible ways of performing, all of
which are variously more or less valuable than others according to some
ethic, the difference is not that some acts are simply good while
others are simply evil. But I am not justified in saying that there is
no difference in the value of what I do or don't do just because no one
can point to 'the good'. I simply have a limited range of
possibilities, some of which are more or less valuable than the others
open to me, and I choose among them according to the differences in
value. These possibilities are best measured against each other; it
makes no sense to measure the value of what I can do in a circumstance
against what I cannot do or (as is common among humans) against what I
could do if only I or the circumstances were different. What does make
sense is to notice that ∙ all performances, possibilities, and facts,
are evaluated by persons according to one kind of ethic or another, ∙
some performances, open to a person in a circumstance, will be more or
less valuable [better or worse] than others according to that ethic, ∙
the differences in value are real, ∙ some differences are more
significant than others, ∙ the differences in significance are
comparative (it is the possibilities actually open to a person, in a
circumstance, that are more or less valuable than each other) and ∙ a
vocabulary of better or worse is a suitable way of talking about
comparative differences. Using this language, I could say of someone
who does wrong according to an ethic, and then does right according to
that ethic, not that she is a good person or a bad person but only that
she has made herself a better person than she would have had she not
done the good, and a worse person than she would have had she not done
the wrong. This might not be as simple as a good/bad dichotomy, but it
is far more truth-disclosing.

A RENOVATED PERSONAL MORALITY

A personal morality which satisfies my input value, and the
basic principles of reliable morality, is that of cultivating a habit of treating
integrity, in all its forms, as prima facie valuable; not that I should
never violate any integrity (which would be impossible) but that I
should institute a habit of performing as if respect for integrity was
good, caring for integrity was better than good, and violating
integrity was worse than good.
This morality makes sense not only because integrity
is valuable but also because it directly addresses the habit, of
violating integrity, which I have found to be both the source of human
violence and inimical to self-ownership. In effect, the morality
renovates my moral default standard. A default standard is the rule
that applies in the absence of any special justifications for doing
otherwise. In parentocentricity, being-towards status by violence is
the default standard, and I assume a right to violate what I can unless
someone else can either stop me or show me that I shouldn't. A morality
of prima facie respect for integrity reverses this logic by favouring
the value of integrity rather than the value of its violation. Thus,
for a renovated morality, the input value would be that of integrity in
all its forms. The rule emerging from this value would be that I ought
to respect integrity. Respect for integrity would be the default
standard, a base-line measurement of adequate value ('good'), nourishing integrity would be a better [more valuable] than the
default while violating integrity would be worse [less valuable].

This changes the traditional human default standard by
institutionalising a universal value (that of all integrity generally)
which, when encultured as a virtue morality, outputs a rule urging me
to cultivate the habit of treating integrity as prima facie valuable
and violation as a prima facie disvalue. This doesn't rule all violence
as wrong but as in need of adequate justification; not that I must
never violate any integrity, nor that I can violate whatever I like
unless I have an overriding reason not to, but that I should not
violate even my own property and personhood unless I have clearly
adequate justification for doing so.
The only adequate justifications of violation,
allowed by a respect for the value of integrity, are those which, on a
comparative scale of the possibilities open to me, actualise more value
than the alternatives by being-useful-towards as much value for as
little violation as is within the skills that an integrity-respecting
[virtuous] person would cultivate. Not that I should never violate
integrity, nor that I should always strive to maximise value, but that
I should habitually predispose myself towards value and against
violation, and should always aim for as little violation of integrity
as is compatible with actualising value. So say, for example, that a
human child and dog both run into the path of my car as I am travelling
down the road. To simply brake would be to risk hitting both of them,
and to swerve away from one is to swerve towards the other. If I put a
dog in peril, by swerving to avoid a human child, I am enacting an
ethic by which, for all persons in all situations, it is better [more
valuable] to be the kind of person who would normally risk a dog to
save a child than it would be to become the kind of person who would
habitually risk a child to save a dog or to whom it doesn't matter one
way or the other. I believe this to be reasonable, valuable, and
impartial, even though it is implicitly political and I would prefer to
eschew all politics if I could. For my belief to be justified there
must be some integrity-respecting way of comparing the value of
different integrities. As it happens there are two aspects of integrity
which, together, enable me to do this.

The quantitative aspect pegs value to amount. By
this measure a tree is more valuable than one of its branches and two
trees are more valuable than one. So, according to this measure, I
would need greater justification for cutting down two trees than I
would to cut down one tree, and greater justification for cutting a
tree down than for cutting off a couple of its branches. I would
similarly need greater justification for harming an animal, which has a
central nervous system and can experience pain, than I would for
harming a tree which does not have a central nervous system and so
doesn't experience pain.

The qualitative aspect attaches value to the
significance that an integrity has for the only foundation which value
has (i.e., the permeate projects of persons). It terms of this measure,
a tree with scientific or rarity value, cultural or religious
significance, for instance, would be more valuable than, say, a
plantation trees being cultivated for their timber. The qualitative
measure is justified just so long as it is ∘ integrated with the
quantitative measure and ∘ comparative - not that some integrity is
valuable and some is not but that, measured against each other by the
quantitative-qualitative scale which counts all integrity as valuable,
all integrities are more or less valuable than others.

To feed my self, or take a medicine to fight an infection, is to value
my integrity above that of the foods I eat or the microbes killed by
the medicine. To let myself die, rather than violate foodstuffs or a
colony of microbes, is to value the microbes or foodstuffs as worth
more than me. It is impossible for any person or any ethic to escape
this comparison, so it pays to have integrity-respecting measures of
comparative value. Cultivating a habit of treating all integrity as
prima facie valuable detoxifies my general relationship with integrity
by narrating an integrity-valuing bias in the place of an
integrity-violating one. Such a person may risk a dog to save a child
but would not, for example, cut down a tree on a newly acquired
property just to demonstrate his status as the owner of it.
This matters because one reason for trying to
renovate ethics is to detoxify my engagements with the world from
parentocentric habits (see About Human Violence). These habits are not chosen by me because I have
calculated them to be valuable. They are simply aspects of a
species-wide human addiction into which I have entered, and to which I
remain in thrall, in spite of my own discovery that violation is not as
valuable to being a person as parentocentricity conditions me to
assume. Like any addiction, that is a problem for any person who wants
to live self-owningally. But the problem with my addiction to violation
does not lie in the violation of integrity per se. The problem is the
compulsion to violate all integrity, including my own moral and
intellectual integrity, under the fear-driven and self-reinforcing
illusion that violating integrity is the only and necessary way to be
safe, strong and significant.
This point deserves iteration. The issue which a
renovated personal morality is primarily intended to address is not
that humans violate integrity in the project of living our lives. That
cannot be the issue given that we must violate various kinds of
integrity in the project of living our lives. Integrity is the vehicle
of all life, and only an integrity-respecting ethic is life-affirming,
but all processes violate something; birds violate the insects they
hunt, insects violate the plants they eat, and plants violate the
ground they penetrate and take minerals from. These are not moral
problems, unless I attribute malice to birds, insects and plants,
because moral issues arise only when there is a choice of the matter. A
plant makes no choice. An insectivorous bird may choose which of
several insects to eat but has no choice but to devour insects. Cows
violate the grass they eat and humans violate the cows that they eat. I
have more choice than natural herbivores or carnivores in the matter of
what I eat, and therefore have a greater responsibility. But, although
I have some choice over what and how I violate, I am no more free not
to violate integrity than is a bird, cow, or wolf. So any moral problem
with human violation is not that we violate but how we violate -
compulsively, without adequate justification, and at the expense of our
own moral, intellectual, social and natural integration. I adopt the
value of integrity as the input value of my personal morality, not just
because all integrity is valuable, but also because treating integrity
as valuable confronts my compulsion to violate it 'head on'. Only this
ethic addresses my addiction, directly and to its face, in a way that
allows me to actualise the possibility of being a self-owning person in
the real world.

RESPECTING INTEGRITY AS A WAY OF LIFE

If I enculture respect for integrity as a virtue morality then I count
it as virtuous [valuable] to be a person who normally cultivates
respect for all integrity. This gives me a virtue morality with one
main virtue (that of cultivating an habitual respect for all integrity)
and one main vice (that of cultivating my addiction to the politics of
violation). I count as immoral only those performances which indulge
that vice at the expense of that virtue.
Because integrity is universal to the character off
all actual and possible objects of attention, the obligation to respect
integrity is also universal. This is not to rule that all violence is
immoral, but it does entail that all immorality will be a form of
violence. All violations of integrity are harmful to the integrity
being violated, that is why they call for justification, but only
inadequately justified violations are worse [less valuable] than the
renovated moral default standard. If a performance does not violate any
integrity then it cannot be morally evaluated by a renovated morality.

Addiction institutionalises habit. To be an integrity-respecting
person, in the face of my addiction to the permeate mythos, will
involve cultivating new habits. This is why respect for integrity must
be a cultivated habit. As a virtue, respect is a matter of habitually
caring about what is valuable to someone or something just because it
is valuable to someone or something. Integrity is valuable. If I cast
respect for integrity as a virtue then, instead of trying to work out
in advance what I should or should not do in certain circumstances, I
will try to institute a habit of respecting integrity in my daily life.
This habitual way of life can then act as a kind of 'moral compass'
oriented towards being the kind of person who respects the value of
integrity no matter where I find myself. I would then trust my moral
compass to keep me being-towards the possibility of living a self-owning
and non-violent life even when I am in novel and/or unforseen
circumstances.

Cultivating the habit of respecting integrity is not a matter of being
idealistic so much as of one of finally becoming realistic. The value
of, and my reliance on, integrity, logically entails that the value of
that integrity counts when choosing how to perform. To respect some
integrity is necessary for any thought, reasoning or value whatsoever.
To respect all integrity is the only morality justified by the
reasoning that integrity makes possible and meaningful. I stay true to
respect for the value of integrity just by trying, in an ordinary human
way, to ∙ actualise a harmony [integrity or coherence] between how I
live my life and the discovery that integrity is valuable and ∙ reduce
the everyday inconsistencies between how I do live my life and how an
integrity-respecting morality prescribes that I ought to live it. This
is not a matter of being perfect but of making the effort to live as if
integrity was valuable (keeping my 'moral compass' pointed towards the
value of integrity, so to speak) in a life that is mine alone, and
different from everyone else's, in a life setting that is full of
constant challenge, failure, change, and new surprises.

Cultivating Respect for the Value of Integrity. The discovery
that integrity is valuable, coming on top of the discovery that
violation is an addictive way of performing inself-owningally as a
person, urges on me a habit, of relating to and engaging with all
integrity as valuable rather than just as something to be violated as a
means to value, regardless of my circumstances and how I do or do not
feel.
An analogy can be drawn here between feelings-driven
love, such as the erotic attraction that lovers feel for each other,
and commitment-driven love such as that of a parent for a child. Most
New Zealanders, for example, tolerate, excuse, or approve of as honest,
the ending of an erotic relationship just because the loving feeling
has gone. But if I neglect or walk away from my children, just because
the fatherly feeling has gone, I would not be lauded for being true to
my feelings so much as condemned for violating my responsibilities to
the children. The difference here is between the larger integrity which
the different loves treat as valuable. The love that does well to
terminate a relationship if a feeling has gone is a love which uses
another, or my relationship with another, to satisfy me. The love that
does ill to terminate a relationship if a feeling has gone is a love
which being-useful-towards the value of another and/or my engagement
with that other. Respect for integrity is like that. If, for example,
the integrity of children is valuable then what emotional satisfaction
I get or don't get out of caring for a child is irrelevant; I respect
her integrity (treat it as valuable) just because it is valuable.
Knowing how to respect the integrity of a child is one of the skills of
this virtue. If I have children but do not take the time and trouble to
learn that skill, or if I know that a child needs care and I do not
give or contribute to her care just because she is not my kin and/or
because there's no emotional benefit in it for me, then I do not value
the integrity of children but only my own self-interest. In that case,
to assert that I care about children is a falsehood of the kind normal
to addicts.

None of this implies that the respect demanded of me, by the value of
integrity, is an exercise of only the intellect or will. Virtue
moralities address the whole person. Persons are emotional and emotions
are belief-laden. So if I truly believe that integrity is valuable then
respect for the value of integrity will engage my emotions to whatever
extent I am performing self-owningally as a person. To respect my
children, for example, is virtuous according to this morality even in
the absence of feelings, to feel affectionate towards my children
without respecting them is worse, to intelligently respect and love my
children is better. So a virtue ethic, enculturing the value of
integrity, urges on me the integration of my whole character -
biological, emotional, and intellectual.
To most folk in my present society, the idea of
cultivating certain feelings is quite contrary to the idea of being
self-owning. self-owning emotions, it is thought, are somehow
spontaneous,
uncultivated. So to be emotionally self-owning is incompatible with
deliberately cultivating emotions that are held to be morally suitable.
What this myth covers up is the fact that we all do cultivate our
emotions. Virtually since I was born, for example, I have been
cultivating excitement in the presence of violation while suppressing
emotional distaste for the harm it does; I have cultivated a highly
convenient indifference to the suffering of others; anger and
indignation at other folk's stupidity and self-righteousness; envy and
a desire for tokens of significance that the undeserving get and the
more deserving don't. Such emotions make me, and reveal me to be, a
collaborator with the very mythos that I intellectually repudiate. So
cultivating an emotional regard for integrity will be as much a part of
repudiating violence as cultivating disparagement for the victims of
violation is part of being normal.
Cultivating appropriate emotions is not the same as
having control over them; if I am anxious, for instance, then I will
feel anxious and that's that. But there is no doubt that, in our daily
lives, all humans are always cultivating variously virtuous or vicious
beliefs and feelings in fact. Because we impose our permeate projects
on the world, we cultivate an integrity of belief and feeling both for
ourselves and for others in our society. It is what this cultivation is
being-useful-towards that a renovated personal morality urges me to
change.
Living the integrity-respecting way of being a person does not,
however, involve pretending to like doing right. Nor does it require
making excuses for or deceiving myself about the harsh realities of
human stupidity and violence. A renovated virtue morality obliges me to
cultivate an intellectual respect and emotional regard for integrity in
all its forms; it does not oblige me to like the performances of my
fellow human, to enjoy their society, or pretend that they (or I) are
nicer or more noble than the evidence allows.

Living a self-owning life does not require special training, skills, or
techniques. All it demands is the response of a whole person: someone
whose emotions, reasoning, imagination, and performances, are
integrated and being-towards the actualisation of valuable character in
a practical understanding of what it is to be a person in the world.
The idea that only the lucky, the powerful, and the clever, can afford
a conscience is a falsehood that translates choice into a contingent
inability. No one is too rich or poor to be self-owningally moral. I do
not have to be P to actualise my potentiality for self-owningally doing
well, I do not have to be privileged or well educated. I do have to
care enough to cultivate the habits of paying attention to reality
rather than just accepting my addiction-warped gloss on it. Paying
attention is a job that the ordinary practical reasoning of ordinary
practical folk can undertake.

Corrupting the Morality. Respect
for integrity entails choosing a way of being a person in the world,
choosing to live as if integrity is valuable, just because I must
choose, all choice is a gamble, but the best evidence I have, and the
best reasoning of which I am capable, justifies a belief that the most
reliable gamble I can make is to be the kind of person who respects all
integrity as a matter of course. This is the gamble for which I am most
willing to take responsibility. Like all virtues, however, respect for
integrity can be corrupted. There is a difference, for example, between
a single act of dishonesty and a habit of performing dishonestly. A
parent-playing virtue moralist could evaluate a single act of
dishonesty as forever damning the person who performed it.
Parent-players tend to do this anyway, but the language and logic of
virtue morality helps to over-damn both evil and weakness along the
lines of, “Performances emerge from character, you performed a lie,
therefore you are a liar” - in the continuing present tense of the verb
'are' - almost as if you get to sit one moral test and are proved
forever virtuous or vicious by my performance during that one test.
This half-truth ignores that character is constantly emerging and
changing, throughout life, as the cumulative effect of choices. For the
victims of the logic, addiction to parentocentricity can then further
twist guilt into self-abnegation - “I have tried to be honest, I
failed, so I may as well give up and just go on being normal” - and
that is not the point of narrating a virtue morality. It is true that
even a single theft would make me a thief, and the force of habit makes
it true that past performances are the best predictor of future
performances. But even having been an habitual thief doesn't make it
any the less valuable for me to stop thieving. This is because being a
person in the world is a project that is ongoing and always
being-towards the future. I am a fact with potentiality, including the
potential for changing who I have been up to date. So, while others may
properly ask "How should we best respond to what this man has done or
not done?" the issue facing the virtue moralist, at any time, is not
"What have I done"? (a question not of ethics but of describing the
past) but “What should I now do (being-towards the future) to restore
the integrity and/or value that I have violated"?

Similar considerations apply to my relationships with other persons.
The performances of a thief, for example, may confront me with a choice
between violating his permeate project and letting him go on imposing
the disvalue of his violence on a community. Even in this case, a
personal virtue morality urges me to perform towards caring about all
relevant integrities - including the criminal's - in my response to
those performances (see Social Morality and Law). This is because it is integrity that
matters. If others unjustifiably violate integrity then renovated
morality calls on me to heal the integrities that they have violated -
in their victims, their communities, and themselves - rather than to
simply write their integrity off as of no account. This call extends to
those, such as thieves, who violate their own integrity; that they do
not treat their own integrity as valuable does not justify me in doing
the same.
I can judge the performances of others, as they
affect the world and the projects of myself and others, just because
they do affect me and others - we live with the differences that they
make to the world. But I cannot assess how well or badly they are being
who they are because neither I nor anyone else knows or can know what
it is to live the life of another. I simply do not have the ability,
the information, or the authority, to sit in judgement over the
self-actualisation of others except where it impinges on neighbours or
a community. A renovated personal morality entails that, in being-with
other persons, prima facie respect for them and myself becomes part of
a default position along with respect for my/their freedom, power and
responsibility - I may logically respect integrity by adjudging that
persons have done right or wrong, insofar as what they do with their
power is accessible to me, but I may not logically respect integrity by
purporting to know whether persons are good or bad. This matters
because respect for persons is so often confused with respect for
performances. I am often told, for example, that I have to pretend that
the lies which other folk perpetuate are justified because not to do so
is disrespectful. This line is especially popular with those who want
to impose dubious and politically-motivated beliefs on an otherwise
unsympathetic society. If I want to claim that a communal project
should not go ahead because it would offend the fairies living in my
garden, for example, then my community would be justified in demanding
that I demonstrate that fairies exist and are offendable. If I argue
that questioning my assertion is disrespectful, to me and/or my tribe
or religion or whatever, and if others are conditioned to believe that
respect is everything, then I can unfairly get my own way. For someone
trying to be a self-owning person in the world there is no justification
for respecting lies or half-truths even if other do believe them. If
there are fairies at the bottom of my garden, if witchcraft works, if
you really can catch gonorrhoea from accidentally pissing on a sacred
rock, then these claims need to be justified according to publically
accessible evidence. To accept them as true simply out of 'respect' for
those who believe them is not the way to being self-owning.

Humans are also notorious for confusing cosmetics with surgery and
outwardly 'keeping up appearances' with inner renovation.
Non-conformity, however, does not make someone self-owning any more than
going 'brrmm-brrmm' makes her a sports car. What it does do is make an
end out of a possible means and issues only in a kind of idolatry. To
merely ape certain attitudes, performances, or figures of speech, to
dress in a certain way, to observe certain rituals, seasons, dietary
restrictions, and so on, is to sacrifice self-ownership for appearances.
Worse, it substitutes the appearance for the reality in much the same
way that saying “I'm sorry” can be a substitute for doing anything
responsible about a performance; it slides from substance to style,
ethics to aesthetics, tenor to vehicle, and message to medium. There
can be some virtue in hypocrisy, and pretending to be kind or generous
can lead to better performances than would a shameless honesty. But
there is more integrity, and more virtue, in behaving as I do because
of who I am, and changing who I am if there is disvalue between that
and what I do.

Virtue in the Absence of Fellowship. One problem with trying to
recover from my own addiction to the permeate mythos is that, at the
present time, I neither have nor know of any integrity-respecting
community of self-owning persons with which to engage and/or from which
to seek support in recovering. There is no 'Alcoholics Anonymous' for
recovering addicts of permeate mythology. Another problem is that I can
expect other persons to make my attempts at being self-owning expensive.
Those who don't care have always been happy to leave those who do care
to clean up their mess, and those who value violence have always
treated any attempt at being decent as a weakness to be exploited.
I cannot solve these problems, but a renovated
virtue morality should help me deal with them because such a morality
obliges me only to do the best I can with what I have got, and the best
I can do with what I have is decrease the quantity and quality of
integrity that I violate while being-towards actualising the most
value. Parentocentricity conditions me to absolve myself from my
responsibility for myself by becoming an effect of other folks'
performance; I am, for example, absolved from being honest if everyone
else is lying. I do not, however, do the best I can by violating my own
integrity in order to respect the integrity of a community addicted to
the violation of integrity.
Both self-ownership and respect for my own integrity
commend to me the virtue of making myself into my own rôle-model.
Renovated virtue morality is being-useful-towards this just so long as
I choose being-towards a self-owning person living a self-owning person's
life in the real world. What matters to virtue morality is not whether
others 'keep their side of the bargain' because virtue makes no
bargain. Virtue morality promises neither penalty nor reward, not an
easy life nor a hard one, neither success nor failure. It is irrelevant
to the virtuous life whether others appreciate my efforts or just go on
being normal. It does not matter whether being virtuous makes me happy,
whether a God notices, or if there turns out to be some kind of karmic
mechanism that rewards virtue. All that matters is that, having
discovered the value of integrity, I take responsibility for what I
know by doing my best to treat integrity as valuable. Let others do
what they will. I am who I am, I do what I do. What I do is what I can
do, and what I can do is enact my own understanding of what is and is
not valuable. Whether that changes everything or nothing, a little or a
lot, it is enough.
Because human persons violate our own integrity
through our addiction, we cannot depend on ourselves for our own
self-validation. We are thus co-dependent on the violated integrity of
others for a counterfeit of that validation; we need others to accord
with our preferences, and feel unsafe otherwise, so we recruit and are
recruited by others to protect and bolster our own self-deception.
Virtue morality, however, helps me keep my responsibility focussed
where it matters most and where my addiction conditions me to most turn
away from it - i.e., on what I am doing with my potentiality for being
who I am in the world. An important aspect of this endeavour is that,
although success is valuable, it is not all that matters; the ongoing
value of being-towards a valued possibility is itself a virtue. There
is, for example, little value in being a mathematician if I cannot be
relied on to get my sums right. But if I value being a mathematician
then there is virtue in being-towards getting my sums right even if I
do keep going wrong and have to keep correcting myself. A virtue
morality not only makes success more likely, through insisting on
persistence, it also makes mistakes more forgivable. So there is
serious and valuable being-towards here. I do expect a virtuous
mathematician to strive for success with some success; while virtue
isn't perfection, the virtuous mathematician, like the virtuous lover,
builder, or person, should make less mistakes, and recover from them
faster, with practice over time. One of the virtues of being a virtuous
person is staying committed to the virtues which make excellence
possible even though we all periodically fail to do as well as we
could. I expect this of a mathematician, a builder, a lover, a doctor,
and the mechanic who services my car. I ask no more or less of myself.

All of this accords with my own understanding that morality is not best
being-useful-towards perfection (which is impossible to achieve in any
case, and is tempting only because of my parentocentric bias towards
god-playing) or some kind of personal 'growth' (the end of all growth
is only death). The point of any culture, including discourse, maths or
science, is the actualisation of valued possibilities. The point of
morality [the evaluative ethics of personhood] is the actualisation of
valuable personhood. The moral default is goodness as a standard of
adequate personhood, but caring about goodness is not a recipe for
either success [political value] or happiness [preference value] in
this world. No one who has paid attention to reality needs the Rule of
Conservation to confirm that goodness-in does not equal happiness-out.
If I set myself up to live a good life in this world then I do so at
some cost to myself and without any guarantee of success, happiness, or
reciprocity. There is no evidential support for the pious hope that
there is some system of reward and punishment in the universe that
'balances the moral books' and will 'pat me on the back' for being a
good boy. On the contrary, it is evident that caring is a nuisance and
recovering from an addiction is a struggle. Indifference is more
effective than goodness at delivering happiness because indifference is
a death-copying state. And death, which is the end of value, is also
the end of the disvalues, such as pain, despair and discomfort, which
cause us unhappiness.
If a death-like state is what I want, if I do not
want to be self-owning enough to care about any integrity (including my
own) and want only to be rich, happy, important, contented, or
uninvolved, then recovering from my addiction to violation is not the
right way to go about that - some sort of drug, secular or religious
ideology, busy lifestyle, or other distraction, would be more reliable.
If I do care about my integrity, enough to want to recover from my
addiction to its violation, then the culture of virtue reminds me that
there are no soft options, no excuses, and no one to deceive but
myself. If I am tempted to be dishonest when no one is watching, when
no one cares, no one would know and none be harmed, then virtue talk
reminds me that I am watching, I care, I know and I would be harmed. No
one else is listening to my justifications. I am plaintiff and
defendant, judge, jury, prosecuting attorney and defence counsel. I do
not have to live, and I do not have to live well or strive for a
meaningful life. But if no one but me is listening to my lies then all
of the normal human excuses for not actualising the value of my
personhood seem rather pointless.